If the equipment on board can detect the laser strikes, can the planes have lasers on board that turn on and point back to the source? I'm pretty sure whoever is down there would look away pretty damn fast.
> he's a bleeding liar to suggest the two events were related.
No, he's not. I've been digging into this story a bit. This is what I believe to be true based on piecing together comments in several forums: AOL is self insured. They had acceptable risk levels. But they had events that blew away their risk assessments. They're having to reclassify their insurance, and that means higher cost for the system next year.
So, true, they didn't have to pay out for these two events. But they are going to have to pay more next year because these two events mean the computed risk of these events happening next year has been elevated.
I am not saying the above is factually true -- I am not a first source. I'm saying that's what appears to be the case based on many Internet posts. I welcome others doing their own digging for info that contradicts my hypothesis.
It is the stories for some of us. Slashdot offers a somewhat odd prioritization of news for the tech world -- an odd blend of electronic libertarianism, open source ideology and hacker creativity. I could find all the stories that slashdot posts elsewhere, but they don't get prioritized the same way. They fall below the radar unless you're really scanning deep.
So, yeah, slashdot is an aggregator. But it might as well be the only source for about a third of its stories because its the only source that promotes those stories high enough that I end up seeing them.
They already deeded their house over to me -- they assigned it to me by saying this is the e-mail address associated with the account. If you ask "who is the rightful account holder", the answer as far as I can tell is whoever has the e-mail address.
No, this is a law that makes it legal to do something that was completely illegal before. Read the full article -- until the law was passed, it was totally illegal in the USA to sell shares in a new company by crowdsourcing. The new law makes it legal and directs the SEC to create rules under which it could happen. This is the rule the SEC is currently proposing.
So, far from fixing a non-existent problem, this law is fixing a problem that many of us in tech have said exists: that small companies cannot get their start up funds from crowdsourcing their IPOs.
I assume, armed with this new information, that you'll be cheering for President Obama taking action on this issue. I mean, there's a lot wrong with his administration, but at least blame him for things he's really screwed up, not for the stuff he's improved.
How is this evil? As far as I'm concerned, this is a great customer service. I can actually see e-mails that I want to read without having all sorts of metadata that I'm not interested in sharing with the entire world shared. Google becomes the one and only company whose behavior I have to monitor, instead of every business online that I work with. Monitoring one is a lot easier than monitoring all of them.
> With Google pre-fetching all of these, every GMAIL address id Verified for the Spammers.
Not necessarily. The article says Google is pre-fetching all incoming images. It could be doing that *regardless* of whether or not the e-mail address is valid. I'm willing to bet that Google engineers thought through all of these arguments and has implemented a system that actually achieves their goals of blocking that sort of information.
> Google doesn't fetch the image until you open the email.
Are we sure about that? I didn't see timing information in the article. Google could cache the images as soon as their server receives the message. In fact, the second article says that Google will automatically download all *incomming* messages. That suggests they're pulling them when the e-mail is sent, thus cloaking whether or not the user has read them. And since that's Google's goal, I'll wager that's exactly what they are doing.
If his job is to prevent terrorism, he's right... he can't do that without a substantial surveillance dragnet that tramples the 4th Amendment. If his job is to investigate and prosecute terrorism after it occurs, he can do that and stay within the Constitution.
I think he would have to convince his bosses (both the administration and the American people) to be comfortable with a different mandate. Are we comfortable with that? I am -- but then, I'm one of those who believes the risk of a government with that level of surveillance abusing its powers seems to me like a worse environment than one in which another 9-11 occurs every 5 to 10 years.
There's a balance that needs to be struck. In my opinion, there's an imbalance right now.
Quoting from the end of the article: > Foremost among them will be whether there is any mechanism that could have allowed life from > this era, if it did evolve, to have survived as the universe cooled down. And if so, whether there > might be evidence of it today.
Seems like it would be possible if a world was in free space during the warm period and then was captured by a sun as the background radiation cooled. Yeah, the handoff would have to be pretty precisely timed, but if there were millions of such worlds, one or two might have nicely transitioned. Does that sound plausible?
Um... did you read the article? Search for this sentence: "The first is the question of whether planets could have formed at all at this stage of the universe." and then keep reading from there. tl;dr? There would likely have been plenty of time and resources for planet formation.
I'll just point out that this "pointless conjecture" comes from a scientist who has contributed more to our understanding of the universe than most people posting on this thread.
If only we had two the NSA and a meta-NSA... the meta-NSA's job is to spy on the NSA. Then we could listen to the NSA and accept advice from them only when the meta-NSA tried to undermine it -- because then we would know that it was a suggestion that actually made the meta-NSA's job harder. We could set it up such that however many files the NSA has in its possession, the meta-NSA's job is to copy as many as possible, and the more documents that the meta-NSA does copy, their pay goes up and the NSA's pay goes down. That way we maintain enmity between them.
In Britain: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone In USA: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
The publisher could've just said, "No, we're not changing it for Americans who we think will be scared off by the word 'philosophy'. It's just one of our DRM changes that happened to end up in a particularly visible location.":-)
Aren't they still legally under a gag order even if it has been disclosed? The FISA letters don't say "keep quiet about this unless it is already public." They say "keep quiet about this period."
It's hard for me to see how we will allow various technologies like self-driving cars to go forward while still holding back the war machines. I mean, I want to hold back the war machines, but writing a law to keep those two use cases separate will be tricky. A child runs out into the street... does the self driving car hit the child or swerve possibly hitting some other car? Does the car evaluate the people in the other vehicle? Whatever logic we put into the cars, that's the same logic -- inverted -- that would run the war machines.
I hope we have high wisdom politicians writing that particular body of law. I know... improbable... but hope springs eternal.
So, if there's some video I don't like on the Internet, I just go there and add a comment saying that it is this Irish dude doing whatever it is that is in the video? I can think of lots of embarrassing videos that various celebrities would like to see go away. Just add "Hey! That's Eoin McKeogh!" to the video and then sue in Ireland.
This is just one of many problems I see with this ruling. It just was the most interesting one.
In the USA, there are all sorts of homeowner associations that control a neighborhood's "view shed", aka the objects that are visible in the sky within a neighborhood. I've seen them successfully push back against businesses wanting to build tall buildings nearby on exactly the grounds that it created an invasive space. I don't know what the answer is, but it does seem like someone should be able to get a private space that still has view of the sun and we should find a legal structure that makes that possible.
That legal structure may be allowing drones... and allow people to shoot the damn things as soon as they are within eyesight of private property. Could be fun!
Wow... slashdot just provided a perfect counter example. In this case, anonymity wasn't the problem. It was people reacting to information from a credible source. Did anyone stop to vet the information? Nope. They sold their shares. That's what we have to get ahead of --- stop reacting and start fact checking. http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/04/23/1938249/tweet-from-hacked-ap-account-causes-high-freq-traders-to-drop-dow-150-points "Stocks plunged and recovered within minutes after the hacked AP Twitter account sent out a tweet that indicated that the White House had been the victim of an explosion and that President Obama had been injured. '...the Dow Jones Industrial Average took a quick 143-point plunge, before recovering most of its losses within minutes. The three-minute plunge triggered by the tweet briefly wiped out $136.5 billion of the S&P 500 index's value, according to Reuters data. Interestingly, Tuesday has been the best day of the week for the blue-chip this year with an average return of 0.46 percent. If the index closes in the black today, it will have been up for the 15th consecutive Tuesday. The last time the Dow rose for 15 straight Tuesdays was in 1927.' An analyst said, 'That goes to show you how algorithms read headlines and create these automatic orders – you don't even have time to react as a human being.'"
The point is that the GP was talking about all anonymous speech, and Chill's point is that to discuss anonymous speech as the problem, you have to cover all anonymous speech. Chill's point is on topic. You might dispute aspects of it, but he does correctly highlight a case where anonymous speech was considered a valuable public good. And you criticizing him behind a veil of anonymous is truly amusing.
Whistleblower laws exist because there are tons of reasons why someone needs to be able to remain anonymous when reporting an issue. There are plenty of reasons to have to stay in the shadows in order to get data out there. As much as you say it is a problem in this case, I can point to many cases where it was critical to very good results. The previous parent is right -- we need to be more aware when data is coming from an anonymous source and try to verify it. If we pass it along, it needs to be with a gigantic "this could be a lie" tag unless we verify it ourselves.
Conversely, knowledge of a source wouldn't have necessarily helped this problem. Suppose you have someone who really thinks they heard a name on the radio scanner. This person is a known credible source and posts with their name, "I heard this on the radio..." You may have just as many people take that as carte blanche to go after the poor devil who was named as you have from the anonymous source. Again... it isn't the source of the information that is the problem. The problem is the people who acted on it. Should we be considering criminal actions against people who badgered the high school student without evidence? That's a conversation I'm open to having.
Named sources or anonymous sources: the problem is the reaction, not the telling.
Did you read the article? It was someone impersonating a diplomat and encouraging problems between nations, which has this bad habit of leading to conflict of various kinds. That's what "diplomatically damaging" means. Free speech does not extend to impersonating someone and falsifying information.
Slashdot Mirror
If the equipment on board can detect the laser strikes, can the planes have lasers on board that turn on and point back to the source? I'm pretty sure whoever is down there would look away pretty damn fast.
> he's a bleeding liar to suggest the two events were related.
No, he's not. I've been digging into this story a bit. This is what I believe to be true based on piecing together comments in several forums: AOL is self insured. They had acceptable risk levels. But they had events that blew away their risk assessments. They're having to reclassify their insurance, and that means higher cost for the system next year.
So, true, they didn't have to pay out for these two events. But they are going to have to pay more next year because these two events mean the computed risk of these events happening next year has been elevated.
I am not saying the above is factually true -- I am not a first source. I'm saying that's what appears to be the case based on many Internet posts. I welcome others doing their own digging for info that contradicts my hypothesis.
> high inflation (government inflation figures are just plain B.S.)
Citation needed. I know of no economic source, government or otherwise, that demonstrates this. Can you provide sources?
It is the stories for some of us. Slashdot offers a somewhat odd prioritization of news for the tech world -- an odd blend of electronic libertarianism, open source ideology and hacker creativity. I could find all the stories that slashdot posts elsewhere, but they don't get prioritized the same way. They fall below the radar unless you're really scanning deep.
So, yeah, slashdot is an aggregator. But it might as well be the only source for about a third of its stories because its the only source that promotes those stories high enough that I end up seeing them.
And the community comments are good, too.
They already deeded their house over to me -- they assigned it to me by saying this is the e-mail address associated with the account. If you ask "who is the rightful account holder", the answer as far as I can tell is whoever has the e-mail address.
No, this is a law that makes it legal to do something that was completely illegal before. Read the full article -- until the law was passed, it was totally illegal in the USA to sell shares in a new company by crowdsourcing. The new law makes it legal and directs the SEC to create rules under which it could happen. This is the rule the SEC is currently proposing.
So, far from fixing a non-existent problem, this law is fixing a problem that many of us in tech have said exists: that small companies cannot get their start up funds from crowdsourcing their IPOs.
I assume, armed with this new information, that you'll be cheering for President Obama taking action on this issue. I mean, there's a lot wrong with his administration, but at least blame him for things he's really screwed up, not for the stuff he's improved.
How is this evil? As far as I'm concerned, this is a great customer service. I can actually see e-mails that I want to read without having all sorts of metadata that I'm not interested in sharing with the entire world shared. Google becomes the one and only company whose behavior I have to monitor, instead of every business online that I work with. Monitoring one is a lot easier than monitoring all of them.
> With Google pre-fetching all of these, every GMAIL address id Verified for the Spammers.
Not necessarily. The article says Google is pre-fetching all incoming images. It could be doing that *regardless* of whether or not the e-mail address is valid. I'm willing to bet that Google engineers thought through all of these arguments and has implemented a system that actually achieves their goals of blocking that sort of information.
> Google doesn't fetch the image until you open the email.
Are we sure about that? I didn't see timing information in the article. Google could cache the images as soon as their server receives the message. In fact, the second article says that Google will automatically download all *incomming* messages. That suggests they're pulling them when the e-mail is sent, thus cloaking whether or not the user has read them. And since that's Google's goal, I'll wager that's exactly what they are doing.
If his job is to prevent terrorism, he's right... he can't do that without a substantial surveillance dragnet that tramples the 4th Amendment.
If his job is to investigate and prosecute terrorism after it occurs, he can do that and stay within the Constitution.
I think he would have to convince his bosses (both the administration and the American people) to be comfortable with a different mandate. Are we comfortable with that? I am -- but then, I'm one of those who believes the risk of a government with that level of surveillance abusing its powers seems to me like a worse environment than one in which another 9-11 occurs every 5 to 10 years.
There's a balance that needs to be struck. In my opinion, there's an imbalance right now.
Quoting from the end of the article:
> Foremost among them will be whether there is any mechanism that could have allowed life from
> this era, if it did evolve, to have survived as the universe cooled down. And if so, whether there
> might be evidence of it today.
Seems like it would be possible if a world was in free space during the warm period and then was captured by a sun as the background radiation cooled. Yeah, the handoff would have to be pretty precisely timed, but if there were millions of such worlds, one or two might have nicely transitioned. Does that sound plausible?
Um... did you read the article? Search for this sentence: "The first is the question of whether planets could have formed at all at this stage of the universe." and then keep reading from there. tl;dr? There would likely have been plenty of time and resources for planet formation.
I'll just point out that this "pointless conjecture" comes from a scientist who has contributed more to our understanding of the universe than most people posting on this thread.
Maybe as soon as a species figures out what Dark Matter is they immediately decide to convert over. Once you go black, you never go back. ;-)
If only we had two the NSA and a meta-NSA... the meta-NSA's job is to spy on the NSA. Then we could listen to the NSA and accept advice from them only when the meta-NSA tried to undermine it -- because then we would know that it was a suggestion that actually made the meta-NSA's job harder. We could set it up such that however many files the NSA has in its possession, the meta-NSA's job is to copy as many as possible, and the more documents that the meta-NSA does copy, their pay goes up and the NSA's pay goes down. That way we maintain enmity between them.
> aircraft carriers ain't going away anytime soon
Gotta have someplace to park the drones, right? How are the rolling drones for repairing the flying drones coming along?
In Britain: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
In USA: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
The publisher could've just said, "No, we're not changing it for Americans who we think will be scared off by the word 'philosophy'. It's just one of our DRM changes that happened to end up in a particularly visible location." :-)
Aren't they still legally under a gag order even if it has been disclosed? The FISA letters don't say "keep quiet about this unless it is already public." They say "keep quiet about this period."
It's hard for me to see how we will allow various technologies like self-driving cars to go forward while still holding back the war machines. I mean, I want to hold back the war machines, but writing a law to keep those two use cases separate will be tricky. A child runs out into the street... does the self driving car hit the child or swerve possibly hitting some other car? Does the car evaluate the people in the other vehicle? Whatever logic we put into the cars, that's the same logic -- inverted -- that would run the war machines.
I hope we have high wisdom politicians writing that particular body of law. I know... improbable... but hope springs eternal.
So, if there's some video I don't like on the Internet, I just go there and add a comment saying that it is this Irish dude doing whatever it is that is in the video? I can think of lots of embarrassing videos that various celebrities would like to see go away. Just add "Hey! That's Eoin McKeogh!" to the video and then sue in Ireland.
This is just one of many problems I see with this ruling. It just was the most interesting one.
I think that's why the court required the "when notified" part. I don't agree, but at least it is feasible to implement.
In the USA, there are all sorts of homeowner associations that control a neighborhood's "view shed", aka the objects that are visible in the sky within a neighborhood. I've seen them successfully push back against businesses wanting to build tall buildings nearby on exactly the grounds that it created an invasive space. I don't know what the answer is, but it does seem like someone should be able to get a private space that still has view of the sun and we should find a legal structure that makes that possible.
That legal structure may be allowing drones... and allow people to shoot the damn things as soon as they are within eyesight of private property. Could be fun!
Wow... slashdot just provided a perfect counter example. In this case, anonymity wasn't the problem. It was people reacting to information from a credible source. Did anyone stop to vet the information? Nope. They sold their shares. That's what we have to get ahead of --- stop reacting and start fact checking.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/04/23/1938249/tweet-from-hacked-ap-account-causes-high-freq-traders-to-drop-dow-150-points
"Stocks plunged and recovered within minutes after the hacked AP Twitter account sent out a tweet that indicated that the White House had been the victim of an explosion and that President Obama had been injured. '...the Dow Jones Industrial Average took a quick 143-point plunge, before recovering most of its losses within minutes. The three-minute plunge triggered by the tweet briefly wiped out $136.5 billion of the S&P 500 index's value, according to Reuters data. Interestingly, Tuesday has been the best day of the week for the blue-chip this year with an average return of 0.46 percent. If the index closes in the black today, it will have been up for the 15th consecutive Tuesday. The last time the Dow rose for 15 straight Tuesdays was in 1927.' An analyst said, 'That goes to show you how algorithms read headlines and create these automatic orders – you don't even have time to react as a human being.'"
The point is that the GP was talking about all anonymous speech, and Chill's point is that to discuss anonymous speech as the problem, you have to cover all anonymous speech. Chill's point is on topic. You might dispute aspects of it, but he does correctly highlight a case where anonymous speech was considered a valuable public good. And you criticizing him behind a veil of anonymous is truly amusing.
Whistleblower laws exist because there are tons of reasons why someone needs to be able to remain anonymous when reporting an issue. There are plenty of reasons to have to stay in the shadows in order to get data out there. As much as you say it is a problem in this case, I can point to many cases where it was critical to very good results. The previous parent is right -- we need to be more aware when data is coming from an anonymous source and try to verify it. If we pass it along, it needs to be with a gigantic "this could be a lie" tag unless we verify it ourselves.
Conversely, knowledge of a source wouldn't have necessarily helped this problem. Suppose you have someone who really thinks they heard a name on the radio scanner. This person is a known credible source and posts with their name, "I heard this on the radio..." You may have just as many people take that as carte blanche to go after the poor devil who was named as you have from the anonymous source. Again ... it isn't the source of the information that is the problem. The problem is the people who acted on it. Should we be considering criminal actions against people who badgered the high school student without evidence? That's a conversation I'm open to having.
Named sources or anonymous sources: the problem is the reaction, not the telling.
Did you read the article? It was someone impersonating a diplomat and encouraging problems between nations, which has this bad habit of leading to conflict of various kinds. That's what "diplomatically damaging" means. Free speech does not extend to impersonating someone and falsifying information.